Anna Mignosa

Does cultural heritage monetary value have an impact on visits? An assessment using official Italian data

In this article, we try to investigate which factors affect the visits to cultural heritage (CH), using Italy as a case study. We adopt a broad definition of CH including archaeological and historical sites, historical buildings and museums, focusing our attention on State CH. In our empirical analysis, we use a rather innovative indicator of CH value, that is, the monetary value of State CH, officially provided by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. Using these data, this article aims at evaluating if such monetary value has a significant role in stimulating visits to cultural sites for the years 1996–2010. We also control for other factors potentially affecting the number of visits to cultural sites, such as alternative tourist attractors and the regional performance in the tourism sector. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that attempts to investigate the effect of CH monetary value on cultural participation.

Cultural and creative industries in Italy: the case of State libraries and their performance

Cultural and creative industries have a central role for sustainable development and great potentialities in the Italian context. This work focuses on Italian public national libraries. They are an interesting case study, as they own cultural heritage and play several functions from cataloguing to conserving book collections and supplying services to a diversified group of users. Using non-parametric techniques of benchmarking, this paper shows that the performance of the Italian public national libraries could improve, with benefits for the whole sector.

An empirical investigation of the impact of redistribution on leisure consumption in OECD countries

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the relationship between welfare expenditures and preferences for leisure consumption. The analysis is based on an unbalanced panel of 21 OECD countries and uses several fixed effects estimators to take into account cultural and social differences across countries. Contrary to previous studies, the data used here include public as well as private expenditure. This allows determining whether there are differences according to the public or private character of the expenditure and examining the interaction between household consumption and government intervention. The impact of economic, socio-demographic and political variables on leisure consumption is investigated. Our results show that redistributive social programmes and leisure consumption are complementary and provide evidence of different patterns of behaviour between government and private leisure expenditure. Furthermore, our findings offer some support to a recent theoretical conjecture suggesting that observed international differences in labour supply and welfare expenditure can be due to cultural and social differences across countries and preferences for leisure consumption.

Public Private Partnership for the Enhancement of Cultural Heritage: The Case of the Benedictine Monastery of Catania

Cultural heritage governance is undergoing a change related to the roles of the public and private sector and the assessment of heritage as an instrument to achieve broader aims, in terms of social, cultural and economic development as the Council of Europe stated in its 2005 Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society. These changes have also characterised the Italian institutional framework where the law introduced a series of norms allowing different degrees of involvement of the private sector in the management of heritage sites and museums and/or of the ‘ancillary’ services necessary to favour their fruition (ticket sales, bookshop, cafeteria). The changes in the law facilitated the introduction of Public Private Partnership (PPP) in the heritage sphere, and examples of these are becoming more common. This paper considers one of these cases, where a private organisation, specifically a non-profit association—Officine Culturali—cooperates with a public institution—the University of Catania—to realise the activities necessary to enhance a heritage site which hosts one of the university’s departments and is included in UNESCOs World Heritage List. The association stands out for its focus on participation that is clearly set in its mission. Looking at the activities run by Officine Culturali, two aspects deserve a closer analysis: product differentiation and the use of heritage enhancement as tools to obtain far-ranging social effects. The analysis illustrates the institutional arrangements that made possible the involvement of a private association in the enhancement of a publicly owned heritage site through the creation of a partnership between the association and the university of Catania. The chapter will focus on the activities of Officine Culturali considering, specifically, their focus on social inclusion and their capacity to attain it.

Theory and Practice of Cultural Heritage Policy

The economic analysis of policies for cultural heritage has referred to the reasons for public intervention and the consequent institutional arrangements in place for the design and implementation of rules that would guarantee the conservation and enhancement of cultural heritage. The analysis of the changes in the last 20 years highlights a trend towards devolution of power to lower levels of government and an increasing role of the private (no profit) sector for the implementation of cultural policies. This trend has been somehow speeded up by the recent economic crisis. This chapter provides a brief overview of these changes. Using a cultural economics approach, it offers some reflections on the impact they have on the conservation and enhancement of cultural heritage.